Franz Rosenzweig’s Hegel and the State (1920; first English translation 2024) is far more than an erudite study of Hegel’s political thought; it is a monumental philosophical biography, a tragic historical meditation, and an intellectual reckoning with the failure of German idealism’s promise when confronted with the realities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century politics.
Written in the shadow of the First World War and published amidst the ruins of the Wilhelmine Empire, the work stages a confrontation between philosophy and history, between speculative system and lived actuality, in order to illuminate both Hegel’s thought and the fate of modern statehood. What distinguishes Rosenzweig’s project from the many other volumes on Hegel that emerged during the so-called “Hegel Renaissance” of the early twentieth century is the way it refuses to treat Hegel as a mere academic philosopher whose system can be reduced to abstract doctrines. Instead, Rosenzweig reads Hegel as a thinker inseparable from the historical epoch in which he lived, a man compelled to interpret, absorb, and respond to the most convulsive political transformations of modern Europe, and whose philosophy of the state is both a rational account of freedom and a tragic mirror of its betrayals. The book thus carries a double weight: on one level, it reconstructs in detail with philological and philosophical precision the development of Hegel’s theory of the state; on another, it reflects on the implosion of the German Reich and the deeper fragility of modern politics, anticipating the moral disasters of the twentieth century. In this way, Hegel and the State is both a study of a philosopher and a diagnosis of modernity itself.
Rosenzweig approaches Hegel not as a doctrinaire system-builder but as a thinker caught within the dialectical movement of his age, constantly forced to mediate between philosophical aspirations and historical pressures. Beginning with Hegel’s earliest theological and political manuscripts—texts like The Positivity of the Christian Religion or his fragments on folk religion and the polis—Rosenzweig uncovers a Hegel deeply preoccupied with the tension between the autonomy of the subject and the ethical demands of communal life. These early writings, often neglected or marginalized by commentators, are for Rosenzweig essential, for they contain in embryonic form the contradictions that will govern Hegel’s later thought. Drawing upon archival manuscripts and unpublished fragments that he had examined in the Prussian State Library, Rosenzweig reconstructs Hegel as a young thinker swept up by the French Revolution, animated by the cultural optimism of the German Enlightenment, and yet already troubled by the question of how freedom can be reconciled with enduring institutions. In this Hegel of the 1790s, Rosenzweig identifies a yearning for Sittlichkeit, or ethicality, which he interprets not merely as a philosophical concept but as an existential longing for a community in which individuality and universality could be reconciled. The tragic element, however, lies in the fact that this yearning is always shadowed by its fragility: the ethical totality that Hegel seeks never fully coheres with the historical conditions of modern life, and thus the promise of reconciliation remains perpetually threatened by the specter of disintegration.
The book is structured in two vast volumes: Stations of Life (1770–1806) and Epochs of the World (1806–1831). The first volume follows Hegel’s formative years in Stuttgart, Tübingen, Bern, Frankfurt, and Jena, culminating in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and emphasizes the intertwining of biography, intellectual friendships, and philosophical development. Here Rosenzweig narrates how the young Hegel’s experiences—his friendship with Hölderlin and Schelling, his immersion in Kantian and post-Kantian debates, his observations of the French Revolution, and his confrontation with the fate of the Holy Roman Empire—shaped his evolving conception of the state. The second volume then situates Hegel within the great historical upheavals of his maturity: Napoleon’s conquests, the Restoration order of the Congress of Vienna, his years in Prussia culminating in the Philosophy of Right, and finally the July Revolution of 1830. By presenting the material in this biographical-historical form, Rosenzweig enacts his central methodological conviction: that Hegel’s philosophy cannot be abstracted from the drama of his life, and that philosophy itself is a struggle to reconcile the subjective trajectory of the thinker with the objective forces of world history. In this sense, the dual structure of the work is not accidental but performs the very problem it investigates: the inescapable tension between life and thought, history and system.
Rosenzweig emphasizes that Hegel’s conception of the state is neither a mere legal apparatus nor a romanticized folk unity, but rather the rational actuality of freedom realized in institutions. For Hegel, the state is the concrete form through which individual freedom is mediated and sustained by membership in a larger ethical whole. Unlike liberal theories that conceive of the state as a contractual safeguard of individual rights, Hegel envisioned the state as the realization of ethical life, where institutions such as family, civil society, and constitutional order interweave to provide a higher unity. Yet Rosenzweig insists that this conception, while philosophically profound, is riddled with tensions. The reconciliation Hegel seeks is never secure, for the very institutions that are supposed to mediate between individual and universal are always vulnerable to distortion. The family can collapse under patriarchal domination; civil society can degenerate into economic exploitation and inequality; the state can ossify into bureaucratic machinery detached from its ethical purpose. Thus, what appears in Hegel’s system as rational necessity becomes, in historical reality, precarious and unstable. Rosenzweig’s analysis highlights precisely this fragility: the state, which is supposed to be the actuality of freedom, can just as easily become its negation.
This tension is most visible in Hegel’s response to the Napoleonic moment, which Rosenzweig interprets as both a philosophical epiphany and a historical disillusionment. On the one hand, Hegel sees in Napoleon the embodiment of world spirit, the universal power that sweeps away obsolete orders and inaugurates a new epoch of history. On the other, he recognizes that the revolutionary universality of freedom must give way to the institutional compromises of restoration and order. For Rosenzweig, this duality encapsulates the tragedy of Hegel’s political thought: a thinker inspired by the revolutionary promise of emancipation yet constrained to reconcile himself with the realities of authoritarian restoration. Hegel’s admiration for Napoleon as the “world-soul on horseback” reveals his acute sense of the transformative power of historical universality, but his acceptance of post-revolutionary Prussia demonstrates his resignation to the necessity of institutional stability. The contradiction is not incidental but constitutive: Hegel’s philosophy of the state is haunted by the impossible task of reconciling the universality of spirit with the particularity of political order.
Rosenzweig’s critique culminates in his analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of the Prussian state, which he treats as both the apex and the undoing of Hegel’s system. Against nationalist interpreters such as Treitschke or Bismarck, Rosenzweig insists that Hegel did not legitimize the authoritarian Machtstaat but rather sought to articulate a Rechtsstaat, a state under law, oriented toward rational freedom. Hegel’s hope was that Prussia could realize constitutional reform, balancing monarchy, estates, and representation. Yet, Rosenzweig notes, this vision was tragically overtaken by the militarism, bureaucracy, and capitalist expansion of the nineteenth century. The very institutions that were meant to embody reason—the monarchy, the civil service, the standing army, the corporations—become autonomous, detached from their ethical telos, and instead function as self-perpetuating mechanisms of power. In this process, the rationality of the state is hollowed out from within, leaving only legality without ethical substance. For Rosenzweig, this diagnosis explains the failure of the German state: Hegel’s normative vision was not wrong in principle, but it was rendered historically impotent by the dynamics of modern power.
For Rosenzweig, the ultimate lesson is sobering. Any theory of the state that relies upon the scaffolding of military bureaucracy and capitalist exploitation is doomed to negate the very freedom it claims to realize. Hegel’s dialectical system had promised reconciliation, the unity of freedom and community actualized in history, but the actual trajectory of German politics revealed a descent into disintegration and domination. Thus, Hegel and the State is not merely an historical reconstruction of Hegel’s thought but a meditation on the fragility of modern ethical life itself. It asks whether philosophy can still affirm the state as the realization of reason after history has so brutally betrayed the very principles upon which that claim rests. The question is not whether Hegel’s method is valid but whether the presupposition of reconciliation is sustainable in a world where institutions perpetually betray their own ideals.
Placed in dialogue with Rosenzweig’s later Star of Redemption (1921), this work reveals a continuity often overlooked. Both texts grapple with the failure of abstract universality to secure a livable world. Whereas The Star transposes the problem into theological and eschatological terms—seeking redemption beyond history—Hegel and the State remains rigorously within the domain of philosophy, working immanently through the contradictions of history and politics. The tragic rhythm of Hegel’s life, from youthful enthusiasm through systematic closure to historical disappointment, mirrors the tragic rhythm of modernity itself: the oscillation between emancipatory promise and actual betrayal. For Rosenzweig, to narrate Hegel’s life is to narrate the destiny of modern freedom, suspended between hope and ruin.
With its philological depth, historical sensitivity, and philosophical audacity, Hegel and the State remains one of the most significant and enduring studies of Hegel’s political philosophy. It is not a commentary that merely glosses the master’s texts, but a confrontation that forces the reader to engage with the ethical fragility of modern politics. In its sweeping scope and tragic vision, the book speaks beyond its historical moment. In an age once again marked by the erosion of democratic institutions, the resurgence of authoritarian movements, and the hollowing of public reason by economic forces, Rosenzweig’s insights acquire renewed urgency. His Hegel is not a dogmatist of the Absolute but a thinker tormented by the question of how freedom can survive in a world where power disguises itself as reason.
In this sense, Hegel and the State is not only a classic of Hegel scholarship but also a philosophical mirror for our own time. It demands, as Hegel once did, that we comprehend the world we have made—without illusions, without resignation, but also without evading the tragic contradictions that define political modernity. To read Rosenzweig’s Hegel and the State today is to encounter both the grandeur and the fragility of the philosophical attempt to think freedom in history, and to recognize that this attempt remains unfinished.
Simon Gros 
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